No President Obama, It Was Private Business That Made Our Roads And Bridges Possible

Jim Powell
, ContributorI cover economic and political history.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

"Private business came first, then roads and bridges."(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Without big government, President Obama likes to suggest, we would all be poor, miserable creatures. For starters, he claims that business became possible only because government built roads and bridges.

Actually, Obama has it backwards. Private business came first, then roads and bridges.

They weren't originally developed by governments. They were developed by merchants who began establishing trade routes thousands of years ago. In the beginning, before the first Department of Public Works, there were innumerable trails.

Developing trails required that somebody travel, and kings generally didn't travel unless they were conquering new territory. If they left their territory for an extended period, they would probably have returned to find somebody else ruling the territory that used to be theirs. So it was merchants, hoping to make money, who blazed the trails for regional and long distance trade. At their own expense, merchants determined the most worthwhile places to go and the most efficient ways of getting there.

Europe’s first great civilizations arose from private trade. Starting perhaps around 7000 B.C.E., a resourceful maritime people who became known as Minoans established themselves in Crete. They were ancient history to Homer. They brought copper from Cyprus, tin from Asia Minor, elephant Tusks from Syria and diorite from the Nile Valley – and Minoan pottery made its way to Egypt.

The ancient origin of private markets and trade routes is most dramatically evident in prehistoric trade goods such as obsidian, a brittle volcanic glass that can be chipped into knife blades, mirrors and other implements. Valued for perhaps 30,000 years, obsidian tools have turned up at most early village sites in the Middle East and Mediterranean. Usually such villages were hundreds of miles away from the sources.

How do we know this? During the 1960s, British archaeologists J.E. Dixon, J.R. Cann and Colin Renfrew gathered obsidian samples from extinct volcanoes throughout the Mediterranean and ancient Mideast. Heated to incandescence, each element in the samples emitted a characteristic wavelength of light. The amount of certain trace elements – barium, zirconium and cesium – varied from one volcano to another. By analyzing obsidian samples from ancient settlement sites, Dixon, Cann and Renfrew could determine which volcano they came from. This isn't the only method of dating obsidian.

Analysis of other commodities confirmed that private trade flourished throughout the ancient world. For example, the remains of many inland Anatolian settlements include seashells from the Aegean as well as amber from the Baltic. Both were valued for jewelry. Copper was used at Ali Kosh, an early farming village in southern Mesopotamia, yet the nearest copper deposits were hundreds of miles away. Pearls from Bahrain, jasper from Armenia, beryl from India and perfume from Egypt have turned up at ancient village sites hundreds of miles away.

Civilization arose not in remote regions but along trade routes where it was convenient for people to gather. Since at least 7000 B.C.E., Jericho was a major commercial center. It was located on a natural trade route between Anatolia, which had obsidian, and Beidha, a village to the south that supplied sea shells and hematite, an iron oxide valued for its red color.

There’s abundant evidence of flourishing trade further east. Archaeologists believe that a light-skinned, dark-haired Sumerian people migrated south from the Caspian Sea about 8500 B.C.E., settling along the delta where the Tigris and the Euphrates empty into the Arabian Gulf. Trade was absolutely vital for civilization there, because the only natural resources were water and mud. Sumerian traders invented sailboats so they could travel long distances. They organized caravans for overland routes.

By the sixth century B.C.E., Greeks began hearing about wonders from the Orient.